Dialogue by Mark:

Our adventures in Italy take us right into today's Masters' Gallery with a painting of one of Italy's most unique cities - Venice. Our Mama Mia of art history, Kim at KidsArt, found this masterpiece at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

"Venice, the Rialto" was painted by the great British artist James M.... W... Turner. Turner had a lifelong passion for painting rivers and the sea, so it's not suprising that his favoriet foreign city was venice, the ultimate seaside city...where the buildings are built right out into the water, and the streets are canals.

This painting is a watercolor done on white paper. Turner carefully drew the busy scene, probably sitting all day in a boat right out in the middle of the canal. Fancy buildings tower out of the water on each side of the picture. Boats with curley ends, called gondolas, fill the water. The boatmen stand and push their boats through the shallow water with long poles. You can see an arched bridge crossing the canal off in the distance, with castle walls and towers beyond.

Turner was a brilliant and successful artist. In his long lifetime he created over twenty thousand paintings and drawings...hmm...so if he lived to be 76 years old and started painting when he was a teenager, that'd be 60 years of art, 365 days a year...where's my calculator...wow, that's a painting or a drawing every day. This guy knew the value of practice. Let's get back and draw some more ourselves...